in action by the requisite
number, but once submitted by Congress it always will stand until
ratified by the States.

Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's paper on Self-Government the Best Means
of Self-Development was read to the committee. A few extracts will
serve to show its broad scope:

The basic idea of a republic is the right of self-government, the
right of every citizen to choose his own representatives and to
have a voice in the laws under which he lives. As this right can
be secured only by the exercise of the suffrage, the ballot in
the hand of every qualified citizen constitutes the true
political status of the people in a republic.

The right of suffrage is simply the right to govern one's self.
Every human being is born into the world with this right, and the
desire to exercise it comes naturally with the feeling of life's
responsibilities. Those only who are capable of appreciating this
dignity, can measure the extent to which women are defrauded, and
they only can measure the loss to the councils of the nation of
the wisdom of representative women. They who say that women do
not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine
domination to self-government, falsify every page of history,
every fact in human experience.

It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold
woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly
accepts. If woman naturally has no will, no self-assertion, no
opinions of her own, what means the terrible persecution of the
sex under all forms of religious fanaticism, culminating in
witchcraft in which scarce one wizard to a thousand witches was
sacrificed? So powerful and merciless has been the struggle to
dominate the feminine element in humanity, that we may well
wonder at the steady, determined resistance maintained by woman
through the centuries. To every step of progress which she has
made from slavery to the partial freedom she now enjoys, the
Church and the State alike have made the most cruel opposition,
and yet, under all circumstances she has shown her love of
individual freedom, her desire for self-government, while her
achievements in practical affairs and her courage in the great
emergencies of life have vindicated her capacity to exercise this
right....

T